


powder keg, spark

by friendly_ficus



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Mild Gore, Multi, Obsession, Pining, The Whitestone Years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-11-02 01:29:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20575928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: Doctor Anna Ripley and the reinvention of the wheel.No, not the wheel. Ripley reinvents the sword. She reinvents killing. She revolutionizes death.(Delilah, watching,wants.)





	powder keg, spark

They meet in Port Damali, Delilah and Sylas as fugitives and Ripley one in all but name, the censure from Rexxentrum left unopened in her distant home. Her distant  _ house,  _ rather, because Anna Ripley wants many things but she has never developed an inclination for domesticity. She hasn’t been court-martialed yet because she wasn’t enough of a fool to wait around for it to happen.

The hunters have caught up with the Briarwoods and she slides up next to Delilah during the ensuing battle, the two of them shaping spells that rot muscle and sinew while Sylas carves flesh from the bones of their pursuers. 

_ He moves strangely,  _ she notes,  _ too fast to be a person. _

It’s Doctor Ripley who kills their last enemy with an entirely new twist of magic. Delilah’s gaze catches on her fingertips, sketching arcane glyphs in the air that are familiar in nature but turned to unfamiliar purpose. Not death magic, but certainly magic that hastened the act of dying. Sylas stands at his wife’s other side, all strength and ferocity. His sword sighs in his hands, content.

“Will you accompany my husband and I?” Delilah asks. Her curiosity has never failed her. “I want to know what you did just then.”

Doctor Ripley considers for a long moment, what scraps of rumor she knows about the Briarwoods. How the image of a devoted wife and her ailing husband lines up with an accomplished necromancer and a lord no longer human. It’s a risk, certainly. 

Delilah doesn’t consider. Delilah doesn’t wait. “If you come with us,” she offers, “I could extend your life. I could make you live forever.” 

“What a charitable offer,” Doctor Ripley muses. “I will not, despite your generosity, live as anything less than human.” Here her gaze cuts to Sylas, whose handsome face is just  _ slightly  _ wrong in the moonlight. “I cannot think of what I would want from you.”

“Come with us anyway,” he says. “And continue your studies until you can.”

The doctor nods, and in the darkness his wife’s smile is a radiant thing.

\---

In Whitestone, Sylas watches his wife watch Anna Ripley.

On the shadowed balcony that overlooks the courtyard, he drapes an arm around Delilah's waist and she leans against him, eyes on Ripley's quick movements. There are tables set up for cows and pigs and unlucky sons of farmers, knives kept nearby to cut the corpses open and examine the damage on the inside. It’s an efficient setup. Everything the doctor does is efficient and he knows Delilah likes that very much. 

"What is it about her," he murmurs, shifting to press a brief kiss to the line of her throat. "What makes you admire her so?" 

Delilah turns her body to be closer to him but her gaze doesn’t waver. She does not flinch at the  _ crack _ of a small explosion below. In the aftermath, in the small plume of smoke, Doctor Ripley shakes her head and turns back to her notes and tools. 

_ What do you want, _ Delilah thinks, watching from above.  _ What star can I tear from the sky for you, to make you stay. What is this weapon, what are you if not a world-ending thing. What are you if you are not mine. What will you ask of me, when you ask at last? _

"She's relentless," she says, almost too quiet to hear. 

Below, the prickling of a spell fading at her ears, Ripley smiles. It's so important to be appreciated.

\---

Doctor Ripley won't be a sycophant and she will never, never be content. Delilah cracked mortality in two when she brought Sylas back but he is pleased to be beside her. What disaster Doctor Ripley requires, she is uncertain.

(She does not waste her time speaking to Ripley of the Whispered One. The doctor has no interest in religion, and Delilah has seen no scrap of faith in her.)

Her first hint at the other woman’s likes, beyond new magic and study and opportunity, comes at the breakfast they share on the way out of Port Damali. It’s a faint smile, so slight that if Delilah were not watching she would have missed it, at the small selection of citrus fruits. Delilah, watching this woman who is crafting some new field of magic, remembers this moment.

It is not the moment she—it is not the moment she becomes  _ fond  _ of the doctor. It is not even the moment her fascination in the study becomes fascination of the scholar. It is a perfectly mundane morning; at least, it is as mundane as the morning after slaughtering the death squad sent after yourself and your immortal husband can be. But the detail sticks in her mind, a briefly pleased expression on Anna Ripley’s face. 

In Whitestone, Delilah orders oranges for their table. There is a bowl of them at every meal, regardless of the season. It is strange to watch Doctor Ripley’s hands grip the peel and pull it back in large pieces. Delilah is used to her writing, or gesturing in conversation, or running a cloth over one of her weapons. It’s somehow different, to see her dig her nails into the skin of an orange. 

Once, the woman peeled the entire fruit in a single spiral and set it casually at Delilah's elbow as she walked out the door, suddenly struck by some inspiration. The orange was of a poorer quality than Delilah truly liked; slightly dry inside, a little bitter. Sylas raised an eyebrow at her, clearly surprised when she didn’t abandon it or order it cleared away.

She carried the sections with her until teatime, and ate them on the balcony while watching Doctor Ripley work.

_ Let me take care of you, _ Delilah wants to whisper.  _ Be mine, and I will kill and raise a thousand gardeners to grow your food. Be mine and never suffer, never hunger, never thirst. Be mine and I will kill the winter so you need not feel a chill. Be mine, be mine, be mine. _

\---

"Relentless," her husband croons.  _ “Relentless, _ you call her.”

Delilah goes still for a moment at her dressing table, in the middle of brushing out her hair.

"Lady Briarwood," he continues, twisting the consonants and upping the tempo of his words, reaching for that briskly efficient way that Anna — that _ Doctor Ripley  _ speaks. "I continue to modify the firearm with increasingly fascinating results. The amount of powder used, coupled with the weight of the ammunition — "

And Delilah is there, pressing her husband against their bedroom wall and kissing him fiercely. They do not speak again for some time.

He traces a pattern on her bare shoulder, after, and is silent.

"You are my love, Sylas," she promises.  _ "You  _ are my eternity. I wouldn't do what I've done for you again, not for any other."

"I know," her husband says. "I'm simply glad you met me first, or you might be discussing  _ me _ while you shared a bed with  _ her. _ I think you still might.” _ _

\---

Delilah imagines the feel of the Doctor's first name in her mouth. She shapes it with care and wonders,  _ what exit wounds do you want, Anna, that would overcome your propriety? What kill would leave you breathless with excitement?  _

“Anna,” she whispers to herself, among the ghosts of Ioun’s corrupted temple.. “An _ na, An _ na _ , Anna.” _

No one hears her. No one but the Whispered One, who hears all her words in the dark.

Well, and the girl she’s brought below the temple and lashed to an altar, who shakes at the sight of her ceremonial dagger and wails behind her gag as her blood fills the grooves in the stone. But that girl is no one, is a sacrifice, is the next step in a ritual with no purpose beyond dying here and now. It’s the right phase of the moon, the right time of year, the right line of the right forgotten prophecy.

Delilah says a prayer to her god and draws the dagger across the young throat. This is routine, is business, is worship but an almost boring kind.

_ Anna,  _ she thinks, and she sketches a glyph with her fingers as the corpse rises into her service.

\---

Somewhere in the haze of gunsmoke and the splatter of blood and the prayers to a forgotten god, Delilah falls in love again. This was not part of the plan.

It's not that she wants to unbutton Doctor Ripley's shirt, well, she  _ does _ want to unbutton the high collar and press her mouth to the sharp jut of her collarbones and sweep lower and make the other woman sigh and tangle her fine fingers in Delilah’s hair and. And.

And she can almost feel the buttons under her fingers when the doctor turns her gaze across the table to Sylas' seat, the one he vacated so quickly tonight. He is giving her a gift. Hells, she can nearly smell the blackpowder and blood and orange peel that ends up in the creases of the doctor’s  _ hands. _

And if she sets down her wine glass and walks around the table and kisses Anna Ripley she might very well be gifted those sighs, might undo those fastenings, might have those hands curl around her hips but—

It's not _ just  _ that she wants to unbutton Doctor Ripley's shirt. Delilah wants to possess, to own, to know the doctor in the most intimate way possible. She wants to crawl inside her skin, to settle in her veins and crack open her ribcage, wants to know what she’s thinking, wants to know what she  _ wants— _

If it were only lust it would be easy, or at least simple. But Delilah has stolen her husband back from mortality, she has spat in the face of the Raven Queen and devoted herself to a hidden god and she rarely wants the simple things. Delilah has never fallen in love without wanting to  _ keep. _

“What do you want, Doctor Ripley?” she asks, because it’s been years and the doctor is a smart woman, she’s had time to think about it.

“The boy who made my weapons,” she says, turning her cool gaze to Delilah’s face. “I wonder if he had more thoughts about them. I wonder what his inspiration was, for the first iteration. It’s brilliant work, if unrefined.”

_ Keep looking at me,  _ Delilah thinks as she sips her wine,  _ tell me what you want. _ Not for the first time, she wonders if Doctor Ripley’s eyes hold something more than calculation as she watches Delilah swallow. She waits.

“I’d like to speak with him,” the doctor says at last. “I’d like fresh eyes on my improvements, and I have questions.”

Delilah  _ smiles. _

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone’s feelings here are unclear except for Delilah’s. She’s thirsting hard. There is a line between pining and obsession and she has never been concerned with the distinction. Is Sylas jealous or indulgent? Is Ripley reciprocating or seeing something to exploit? I’m genuinely not sure. Is the implication here that the Briarwoods headed to Emon as part of Delilah’s slow seduction of Ripley? Who knows tbh. It’s a will-they-won’t-they that i might write a follow-up for someday, because I love these characters so much, but this is the best that i can do for now. there are better takes on this relationship but this is my attempt at it  
I know this is different from what I usually write, but I hope you liked it! Leave a comment and let me know what you think!


End file.
